A little while back, I swung over to tribe.net, in response to Rob
Anabolic mentioning it by displaying a list of his assigned
friends. I had a look around and clicked a few things, but wasn’t all
that fascinated. Sparkes also signed up, and later, so did Matt.
I wrote testimonials for the three of them and registered in
a few of the “tribes“, which are basically message forums around a
common theme. At that point, I would have lost interest entirely. Matt
has done so: he remarks that’s he’s “spent the time since trying to
work out what it’s for“, and that the links between people are cool,
“but neither they nor the forums are enough for me to visit regularly“.
I concur entirely. However, I did note that (a) you get emailed when
something specifically about you happens (someone adds a new
testimonial or sends you a private note), and (b) that each tribe forum
has an RSS feed (see the nasty orange
XML icon next to the “Public
URL” atop each tribe’s homepage). So I just
subscribed to each of the tribes’ RSS feeds in
my RSS aggregator and forgot about it.
This is poisonous behaviour to the whole concept of tribe.net, though.
They’re trying to build a community, and I’m a parasite on that
community, by refusing to get involved. Instead, I expect other people
to provide interesting stuff, and then I expect it to be served up to me
steaming hot and ready for my perusal. Probably I should feel guilty
about this, but I don’t. There’s nothing compelling there to warrant me
getting involved. Part of this is its US-centric nature: as Matt
mentions, the “Listings” feature, which finds things that people have
listed within a given radius of your postcode, would be useful if it
recognised anything other than American zip codes. Apparently Southern
California is within five miles of my house, which, barring some kind of
major-league tectonic shift which I could hardly have failed to notice
in spite of being at work, it ain’t.
I think one of the primary reasons why I don’t get to grips with it,
though, is its web-based nature. I don’t like web applications, or at
least I don’t like traditional web applications where every damned
click results in a ten second wait for a page to refresh. Bloglines is
good because I can use it from home and work, but if there was a decent
desktop-based RSS aggregator which worked on
Windows and Linux, could share its status files between one invocation
and another somehow, and let me trivially open clicked links in
newly-created tabs in Firefox, I’d move to it like a shot. I have to
keep going back to Bloglines and clicking “My Blogs” and waiting; yes,
it refreshes itself, but I have no way of knowing how long ago it did
that, so I end up clicking again because I want totally up-to-date feeds
when I get the time to peruse them. We really, really need to start
getting web apps that use the power of browsers to act like a
rich-client app, and that means not having to wait. There’s a growing
swell of activity in this area, but at the moment it’s marred by
everyone wanting you to use their method so they can be seen as the
architects of the new wave of World Wide Web 2. This is what everyone
fears XAML will be, too, and I cna’t imagine
they’re wrong. I’m peripherally involved with a couple of the efforts in
this direction as well, but there’s not a lot of forward progress (and,
yes, I should get more involved and try to rectify that rather than
carping about it. However, see above.)
Maybe there’s a bright future ahead where we’ll basically not know the
difference between an application running on the web and one running on
the local machine. Maybe, as a nice side benefit, that’ll displace
Microsoft’s stranglehold on the desktop, and we can all be happy
about that. Maybe, on the other hand, we’ll all be bickering about one
thing or another until the end of time. God, I hope not.
Tribe.net and other online communities
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